Such multi-carrier systems often implement Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) as multi-carrier transmission technique. OFDM is for example used in the HIPERLAN/2 standard as well as an extension of the IEEE 802.11 a standard for the 5 Ghz area. OFDM could also offer a sensible alternative for high-speed mobile applications, and thus represents an important step for next generation mobile radio systems or for a 4th generation air interface. To this extend, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), for the standardization of high-speed broadband wireless mobile communication systems, is recently considering the application of OFDM techniques for the high speed data packet access (HSDPA) air interface communication between the radio access network (RAN) and the user terminal (UE).
In multi-carrier systems as OFDM transmission system, the transmitted data is split into a number of parallel data streams, each one used to modulate a separate sub-carrier. In other words, the broadband radio channel is subdivided into a plurality of narrow-band subchannels or sub-carriers being independently modulated with e.g. QPSK, 16 QAM, 64 QAM or higher modulation order allowing higher data rate per sub-carrier.
In such OFDM systems, the sub-carrier frequencies can be allocated to a user channel on a short term basis (e.g. all 2 ms) as well the modulation order per sub-carrier defining a transmission channel for each user should be updated on the same short term basis.
A very important task of such multi carrier systems to provide for an efficient sub-carrier/modulation allocation to the different users. This is necessary to optimize and extend the performance of the multi-carrier system.
On the one hand, the selection of the best appropriate sub-carrier for each user should take into account that in mobile environment with multipath radio channels some sub-carriers may be subject to very strong channel attenuation when seen by a given user. Such sub-carriers would be useless allocated to this user because of fading. On the contrary they may be received with good quality by other users.
On the other hand, when the best appropriate sub-carriers are identified for a user, the optimal modulation to be used on these sub-carriers should be appropriately selected. The higher modulation orders can only be used if the signal to noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver is high enough to allow the demodulation.
All this optimization requires exchange of signaling/measure information in a feedback channel, so that the entity of the network which is responsible for resource allocation, respectively for modulation selection (e.g. the base station or Node B) disposes of quality measures performed at the different user equipments (UE).
In HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) systems, only one channel quality measure is transmitted from the user terminal to the base station. This channel quality information CQI is defined in 3GPP standards, 3GPP 25.214 and 3GPP 25.211. The channel quality information is however not accurate enough for multi channel systems
In the ideal case, each user terminal should make a channel quality measurement for each sub-carrier and report it on the feedback channel to the Node B. The drawback is that this would represent a huge amount of signaling information (some Mbits) especially in multi carrier system with up to thousands of sub-carriers.
A particular object of the present invention is to provide a method for sending feedback information regarding the channel quality in a more efficient way so that the amount of feedback information is reduced but anyway sufficient for performing an efficient resource allocation in the multi carrier system.
Another object of the invention is to provide a corresponding user terminal and base station.